Although we are bigger these days, I still manage to take the first part of induction day for people who have just joined Kainos. In the past year that’s just over thirty separate induction sessions.

At the very start of every talk, I recount an observation from my friend and colleague, Paul Gannon. “It’s only six months after someone joins a company that you realise who told more tall tales during the interview process, the company or the candidate!”

While I don’t agree with this slightly cynical anecdote, it does make for a snappy one-liner at the start of my presentation, and who doesn’t like to appear witty and intelligent in front of new acquaintances?

But it does raise a question. When I’m describing where the company is headed, what if someone decides that it’s not what they want? What do they do? Not show up for day #2?

So let me give you the short version of where we are going (within the constraints of being a public company and forward-looking statements blah, blah, blah).

We’ve been around for 30 years and have grown organically. Today we are 1,000 people, working with over 200 clients. We do a lot of stuff, but it broadly falls into three areas.

Workday implementation
First, we work with Workday Inc, implementing their software in Europe for clients like Travelex, Easyjet and Tom Tom. We are Workday’s best partner in Europe. Workday compete with Oracle and SAP, delivering Financial and People-focused systems that are cloud-first, mobile-first and who have 1,400 global clients like Netflix, LinkedIn, Astra Zeneca and Cornell University. Workday are poised to win this market – a company that focuses on customer success, that employs talented people and that builds great software has an unfair advantage. We are going to help Workday win, and we are going to continue to build on our leading market position. When we have nothing left to prove in Europe, we’re going global.

Outstanding Digital Platforms
Second, we build outstanding digital platforms for our clients – progressive organisations that are looking to revolutionise their digital interactions. If you’re living in the UK, there’s a good chance that you are one of the 55 million people who, in the past year, have interacted with a system we have delivered – your online driver licence, your MOT, voter registration, and more besides. We build the digital service from scratch – open source, agile, UX, DevOps – you know the drill. It’s exciting, challenging and impactful. In the public sector, UK Government have tackled 40 digital services, we’ve been involved in almost half of them. There are another 250 to go. Buckle up.

Revolutionising Healthcare Technology
Third, we build great healthcare software. It’s called Evolve and in the UK it is used in over 100 hospitals, managing over 1 billion images for 28 million patients. It’s got clever workflows and forms as part of the platform, designed by healthcare professionals to improve outcomes for patients. And just last week, we went live in our first US-based hospital, with a workflow (think ‘app’) designed to support care teams providing urgent care to stroke victims. Next up is designing a workflow for neonatal resuscitation. Our software helps to save lives. There are 1,069 hospitals in the UK and 5,564 hospitals in the USA. We’re just getting started.

Watch our latest video on Evolve.

So what does all that mean?

We only thrive as a company if we have talented people working here. People who want to contribute, who are ambitious, who want to make a difference. Each year, half of the people who join Kainos will be experienced, the other half will be starting out on their career and join from school or college. We want to shape and develop people’s careers – last year we had 204 promotions.

With the opportunities that we have in front of us there are few limits on how we might grow. How far, how fast, how many? You see, the thing is, we all get to decide, because that is the way that Kainos works.

Kainos provides digital technology services and platforms for organisations across the globe.
We've been delivering award-winning IT solutions, consulting and specialised digital products for over
30 years, and employ almost 1,000 people across Europe and the USA.